Fermilab Ends An Era To Start 2nd

Historic Particle Injector Shut Off To Make Way For Super Accelerator

The anticipation coursing through the already high-energy atmosphere at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is akin to that of a family watching a new addition going up on their home.

In Fermilab's case, it's an estimated $350 million addition expected to shepherd revolutionary advances in the vital but often opaque field of high-energy physics.

Yet the project that the lab justifiably states will mark "the end of one era in frontier particle research and the beginning of another" was ushered in with little fanfare outside the bucolic 6,800-acre laboratory in Batavia.

Four scientists in a control room held a giant gold lever last month and had their picture taken for the lab's newsletter as they switched off the beam in the historic Main Ring particle injector. After a small celebration, everyone got back to work.

With good reason. Fermilab's project is a daunting, complex one. Begun in 1992, the seven-year effort called for construction crews to build a 2.25-mile concrete loop 27 feet underground just southwest of the 4-mile main loop.

The new ring, known as the Main Injector, will serve as a super accelerator of protons and antiprotons to push into the Tevatron, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, which runs in the underground loop that also was occupied by the Main Injector's predecessor, the Main Ring.

The collaboration of both new systems is expected to yield a tenfold increase in the number of high-energy proton-antiproton collisions.

This is, perhaps, where high-energy particle physics gets highly dense for most people.

In its most basic context, physics is the study of energy interacting with matter. What's clear is that, at Fermilab's level of study, a link to practical applications gets somewhat tenuous. Physicists at Fermi are probing the depths of physics to find the smallest particles of matter and energy--an endeavor that requires enormous investments.

A typical experiment takes more than a decade, and research equipment's cost easily stretches into tens of millions of dollars.

But a look at what particle physics has brought to everyday living helps explain why this work is so critical, even without knowing in advance exactly what new research will yield.

Particle physics gave the world radio, television, X-rays, transistors, radar and lasers, power generation and every electronic device operating on Earth. It has yielded beams of neutrons and protons for treating cancer.

Using radiation from particle acceleration, scientists recently determined the structure of the gene responsible for Lou Gehrig's disease. Other teams of scientists are using the radiation, known as synchrotron radiation, to develop drugs to block a key enzyme in the replication of AIDS.

Once experiments resume in 1999 at Fermi, the trillions of collisions of particles that led to those advances will be occurring faster and with more protons and antiprotons--and physicists will be able to monitor them more precisely.

"Things we could only look at on a cursory manner, we'll now have thousands of," said Al Goshaw, a physicist working on the project. "We'll be able to ask some very sophisticated questions."

But to assess the results of those collisions, scientists from across the globe are working on a complete upgrade of Fermi's two particle detectors placed along the Tevatron loop. These behemoths are three stories tall, weigh 5,000 tons each and are lined with intricate circuitry of more than 100,000 wires-- each to monitor separate consequences of Earth's tiniest particles crashing together at nearly the speed of light and spraying apart.

As part of the work, the Main Ring, workhorse in 25 years of particle physics at Fermi, is being cannibalized. Crews are dismantling 120, 5-ton magnets from the Main Ring to install in the Main Injector.

Beyond that, workers have constructed complicated water-cooling systems and computer-packed monitoring and maintenance buildings along the injector route. While the work proceeds, the Tevatron has been shut down.

Regardless of its fate, the Main Ring has a significant history.

Designed in 1967 and completed by 1972, the Main Ring was pursued with famous relentlessness by Fermi's founding director, Bob Wilson. He pitted two contractors against each other by paying each a third of their money and the final third to the one who finished first.

To push construction crews, Wilson insisted scientists install the large magnets just as soon as a section of tunnel was in place.

The result was a tunnel that was completed on time and under budget but with magnets that short-circuited, ion pumps that failed and pieces of copper found lying in the particle beam pipe. At one point, researchers attempted to train a ferret named Felicia to collect debris in the ring's vacuum tube by dragging a harness through the tube. Felicia refused.

After those bugs were cleared, the ring was the setting for numerous breakthroughs, including Nobel laureate Leon Lederman's discovery of nature's ultimate building block, the bottom quark. But the advances the ring brought forward also led to its obsolescence. Antiproton beams began bottlenecking in the main ring, limiting the number of collisions in the detectors and thus the advances that could be made.

That led Department of Energy officials to push for construction of the Main Injector at Fermi. The old ring will be missed, as much as a collection of stainless steel and iron, copper coils and red hoses and black cables can be missed.

"I wouldn't call it sentimentality," said Dixon Bogert, deputy project manager for the Main Injector. "But there is always a reluctance on the part of a technologically sophisticated person because . . . it's going to take awhile to get to know the new equipment and to get it to do what you want it to do."